Supplejack

by Les Petersen

“Thank you, Sansan. Maintain full alert. GaZe, give me medical.”

  When I sat beside her and drew her against me, trying to comfort her, she banged her head repeatedly against my shoulder and started to cry softly. Her head was thumping against the hot slice from the grenade, but I gritted my teeth and told myself that I could feel nothing. It was a pity I didn’t listen to myself. She didn’t look good and her condition would only get worse. “Come on, Barb, we have to look after this shoulder. It’s OK. It’s OK.”

  GaZe had already read her condition from her own JON and I shuffled around to face her. She sat back against the rocks, her head tilted back and tears rolling down her cheeks leaving a trail in the dust of her face. She was no longer making any noise. I punched up for natural light and the holoface showed her shoulder was a mess. Doc’s bag was a treasure trove of medical supplies and with the PAN rattling off diagrams and instructions I patched her up. When she was bandaged and I’d shoved a wound pad against the cut in my shoulder, I eased her to her feet, threaded both our weapons over my shoulder and gave her Doc’s bag. I had her lead me back toward the bunker where she had kept me a few hours earlier.

  Barb leant against my shoulder and I hobbled a little, my holoface spreading a red light across the pathway as we walked. We didn’t go back past Doc, but even then we came across bodies. The whole area seemed strewn with the dead. Most of them were Ferals, but quite a few Tinmen bodies as well, those who’d been caught in primitive traps, drop falls and pits. They had been blown apart by their own body booby traps and in the red light they looked like they had been turned inside out and skinned. I changed the light to the blue spectrum and the bush was cold and distant. I left it that way.

  Sam was waiting for us at the bunker. She had been able to take the mini-gun from the dead soldier and had mounted it on a new set of body armour she was wearing. It tracked us as we walked up to her. Along her scalp was a red gash and she had twisted her holoface so that the head pad wasn’t lying across it. She looked like something had bitten her on the bum and she was going to blast it to hell.

  Standing beside her was Malachite, Shotgun and two other men. All of them were covered in grime and dust and in the multi-coloured light of our holofaces we must have all looked like aliens. Standing at Sam’s shoulder was one of the women from the Forum room, a tall woman; almost six foot six and quite slender. Her shoulders were powerfully built though and she had the same kind of grace as a cyber warrior. If we were on the Cloud and she was talking to me, I would have all my defences primed and be preparing for immediate departure.

  Medusa hissed like a snake in my ear. Her signal could not be mistaken. I tongued the holoface into receive mode and the Heads-up gave me the read out of the woman. I could’ve spat buckets. Things had just got worse. I gave the women a bow. “Gilamens, I presume.”

  Sam looked at me and then at Gilamens. “You tell him who you are?” she asked. Her mini-gun swung around to face the woman.

  Gilamens shrugged nonchalantly. “His PAN would know me, live or on the Net. It’s all nuances. I wondered how long it would be before we finally met, Jack Dayzen.”

  “Far too soon for me,” I said. “You look different than your Cameo.”

  She laughed softly. “Mediavision requires a square jaw line and soft features, but I’m not vain enough to have the changes.” She flicked her coat open and I saw she was wearing one of the latest PANs: the 620 series, set in a sleek rainbow of chrome. “You know Shapocket.”

  Her PAN sent through greetings in multiple coloured heart shapes that danced across Gilamens’ holoface.

  My PAN crackled in readiness, but I set them on standby.

  Sam stepped closer to Gilamens and demanded her attention. “You call these troops in when you found out who he was?”

  Gilamens looked startled. “What? I’m the Press, not a turncoat!”

  “Did you sell him out for us? Is this an exclusive or hunting for funds?”

  “Am I that shallow?”

  The answer didn’t satisfy Sam. “You’re avoiding the question.”

  Gilamens stood back stiffly with her fists in tight balls and her arms dagger straight. “He was at the Flintlock Bureau and Bell recruited from their training institute. So, if he’s ex-Flintlock and if he’s Bell, then he’ll have an implant, which the military can home in on it whenever they want. Both of them use implants. He brought them here himself.”

  The mini-gun swung around to face me again. Before Sam could demand an answer, I let her know about the implant. “Yeah, I’ve got an implant. Bell enhanced it after the take-over of Grendel, but I disabled the implant years with nanos and rewired it. Talk about ringing in your ears, I kept wondering who would answer the phone.”

  They didn’t laugh at the joke, just continued staring at me with hostile faces. “I’m telling the truth,” I said. “The plant is dead, Gil. I use it as storage now. Look, ask yourself how easily I could’ve been caught years ago, if it was still active.” I turned to Sam. “Maybe you better ask yourself what a Grey-card is doing with a bunch of bush babies.”

  Malachite lifted the SLR he had been carrying and pointed it at me. “You call us bush babies once more I’ll cut you down where you stand.”

  Sam raised a restraining hand. “Easy, Mal. There is no question of Gil’s loyalty, Flintlock. If it hadn’t been for her, the Luddites would have wiped us out many times over.”

  “And you didn’t see what she did tonight when them soldiers came here,” Malachite snapped. “She fought with us! She stood by us and has bled with us. She had nothing to do with the troops.”

  You just had to dislike the guy. “That was a long speech for someone like you.”

  He snarled. “Outsider! You brought death here and you should pay the price.” He cocked the gun.

  “Malachite!” Sam barked for him to put the gun up. “You leave him alone. He’s my responsibility.”

  “He ain’t worth it, Sam. Nothing’s gonna bring back the Doc or any of the others, but his blood will ease my mind.” He aimed at my chest.

  Shotgun stepped back out of the line of fire.

  Sam’s mini-gun hummed in its cradle. A laser point appeared on Malachite’s chest. Things were looking dangerous.

  I held up my hands. “Now gang, can we have a little moment to think about this?”

  Malachite still seemed confident in the strength of his position. “This is just the kind of thing they’d do, plant a man in our midst and then come in on the pretext of killing him. He’s a stoolie if I ever saw one. Bloody Steel Hand.”

  I took a step sideways, pushed Barb gently away from my side. “I’m not with the Hand and never had been.” I held my hands palm up and taking a further step away. “Hadn’t you better look after your wounded?”

  For a while all that any of us could hear was the whine of mini-gun’s targeting macro feeding information into Sam’s PAN, which seemed as loud as a jet fighter prepping for take-off. Finally, the moment passed and Malachite put his gun up to his shoulder and turned away. Sam cut the drive and the gun whirred to a stop. She looked at me. “Wasting a bullet on you might be worth it.”

  Before I could retort, Barb spoke up. “Sam, he saved me from the soldiers.”

  “He might do that if he saw things going against his plan.”

  Things were a little screwy. They were wasting time. “Look, we’re going over and over on this,” I tried to explain. “Let’s move on. The military’ll come back in here in fifteen minutes, do an aerial fly-by and put a stick down on you and burn all this area to a sea of glass. And for your info, I don’t bloody know what’s going on and I’m not part of some master plan to wipe out your little enclave.”

  “Then why is Boris Stromlo part of the seeding of our area?” Sam asked.

  I felt like someone had upset a bowl of ice inside my stomach. “That’s just a disguise to get through the Squads. It’s a fabrication. Christ, if I knew what was going on I would tell you! You’ve...you’ve had enough time to research
me and so has she.” I pointed to Gilamens standing watching. “You looked at my PAN back there, didn’t you? So, you know about as much about me as I do.”

  Gilamens was still clenching and unclenching her fists; I turned back to face Sam. “Why don’t you ask her to tell me the truth?”

  They all stood watching me. I waited, but nothing was said. I glanced at Shotgun, who hadn’t spoken in all that time and at the two other men. They could’ve been statues made of stone for all the effort they were putting into what was happening. “Well, whatever you think, you’d better do something soon. Shoot me or forgive me, but don’t take any longer on it.”

  Barb pulled me back a few steps and stood in front of me. “He saved my life, Sam. We have to help him.”

  Malachite didn’t like Barb standing in front of me and he was almost snarling when he said, “We have our dead to bury! The kids are scared witless. If the Tinmen had found them in the bunkers they’d all have been dead. We lost almost twenty of our loved ones–”

  “Malachite! Enough!” Gilamens walked over to me, looked up into my face and poked me in the chest with the pistol she was carrying. A fire burnt in her eyes, the kind of fire that smoulders for weeks and then ignites in a furious all-consuming rage of nature. “How’s his aura, Barb.”

  Barb, nursing her arm and the bandages wrapped around her torso that shone red in the torchlight, said “His aura hasn’t shifted at all, Gil: it’s still light blue. He really believes he is being pursued for some hidden reason. He’s not lying as far as I could tell and when I read him earlier I felt he had no wish to be here. He is hiding a lot, but nothing to do with what is happening to him currently.”

  And all that meant that Barb was an aura reader. I’d heard about them and their skill of delving into the nature of people. Bodies give off a halo of light a skilled reader could take apart the same way a lie detector could read the surface changes of the target—well, supposedly. And that was what she was doing in the bunker, I realised, feeling my desires. Man, I thought it was my body she was after.

  Sam huffed in annoyance, but said nothing. Gilamens looked at me, then at Sam, then the others. “All right, he lives,” she said to them. “What do you want to do now?”

  Malachite was the first to speak up and I was getting to hate the bastard even before I heard his verdict. “We ransom him back to the authorities. We need new equipment and to replace some of the trees that got burnt down. If they want him enough they’ll pay top dollar.”

  Barb said, “He has enough trouble of his own to worry about. Sam, can’t you take him back to Walkers Flat and help him sort it out?”

  Sam didn’t reply to Bard directly. Instead she turned to Shotgun. “Shotgun, what do you think?”

  The big guy looked backward and forward between the women and me, and I sensed he wasn’t too impressed with what they were suggesting. He pursed his lips, tucked his hands into his belt and finally he gave us his verdict. “This native bush around us isn’t only tree and shrub; there is also the Supplejack that climbs all over it and ties the canopy together. Without the vine we harvest to create webbing, we would be easily seen from the air. Without the creeper tying together the branches and the tall spires of the forest, some of the animals we tend would not exist. He is like the Supplejack, climbing over society, but binding all of it together and creating living space for those who need it. He is Supplejack.”

  I couldn’t get over the almost mystical parable he had sprouted and I found my mouth had dropped open. I was just about to thank him when he started talking again. “But he is too much the cyberwarrior to have around here; he could never accept the real world. I think, Sam, you should take him away from here. Forever.”

  It sounded more like a condemnation than anything else anyone had said and I wasn’t about to be dragged away to a shallow grave without some answers.

  “Hey, look,” I pleaded, “I’ll go away and forget I ever met you, if that’s what you want, but if you know what’s going on with the military and Squads and all the rest, for Heaven’s sake tell me.”

  Sam turned to look at Gilamens. One movement that proved in the same instance that she had an answer. I could have leapt across the clearing and throttled her.

  Gilamens glanced at me, and then at Sam. Sam gave her an almost imperceptible nod. Gilamens turned to face me. “Well, Flintlock, from word on the grapevine…” she glanced at Shotgun “or the Supplejack vine if you will…it appears your DNA structure holds the location and opening code of a Baeder Box.”

  “What?”

  “You do know what a Baeder Box is, Flintlock?” Sam asked me.

  That remark cut like a knife. “Of course! It’s a secure data bunker the size of a small coffin and impossible to get into, maybe even for someone like me.”

  “Well, the Baeder Box your DNA is the code for contains all the R&D from Grendel Corporation.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “It’s been missing for some time and Bell now know your DNA is the answer so they want that code and they mean to take it – litre by litre.”

  A Baeder Box. You need a Mil encryption code-breaker, three strong men with faces like donkeys and about three hundred years’ worth of peanuts to keep them entertained to crack your way through the maze. Even an AI primed with a life history of the storage would still be unable to get into it. Too many AI mine fields in the safety boxes.

  It all started making sense. Information in a DNA strand. Like Morse code – light bands and dark bands. Enough of them to create a computer program or part of one that would activate the rest of it. The seed. After all, it was only ones and zeros. Black and white.”

  “And that’s all they want? My DNA. Christ, they can have a tissue sample. Why didn’t they ask? They could’ve had it anytime they wanted it; I could give them a sample. Tell them. Tell them I can piss on their party–”

  Gilamens told me to shut up. “They believe it’s you behind the concealment of the Baeder Box.”

  “Shit.”

  “Stop being so angry. I can do something about it.”

  Was I getting angry? I didn’t think so. If I ever get angry, people get arrested. Maybe these Ferals had different ways of expressing disgust. I tempered my outburst by being sensitive to what they wanted. “Oh, I get it. In exchange for my safety, you want something from me. What is it? Money? Power? The answer to the Rubik’s cube?”

  “You are annoying, Flintlock.”

  “What happened to the ‘Mr’?”

  Gilamens shook her head. “Why don’t you take a deep breath and relax–because this display of childish behaviour is proof of the personality instability caused by Cyberwars. And yes, I’ve decided you can do something for us.”

  “Like what? Fertilise your vegetable garden?”

  She flashed me a small smile. “Not quite. You might be full of manure, but it’s sure to bring out weeds. No… How about a trade of skills? I’ll arrange to have this little hunt for you abandoned in exchange for you completing a small task for us?”

  “You are capable of completing your side of the bargain? Getting the Mils off my back will take a lot of kudos. The Brother’s Four? You haven’t got that much credence.”

  She ignored my outburst. “Are you capable of your side?”

  “Depends on what the task is?”

  “We want you to acquire a billion dollars for us.”

  The amount stopped me in my tracks. I gave an involuntary cough. That amount of money was impossible to get. Too much work and easy sources were heavily protected: worse than breaking open Fort Knox. “What do you want that much for?”

  “It will buy us independence.”

  “You can’t buy independence!”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, but you can if you know who to bribe.”

  “Jeezus. What a mess.” I ran a hand through my hair and tried to think of another way to get out from under the umbrella of these lunatics.

  Gilamens eyes were flashing in the firelight and I could s
ee the devil before me holding out the paper that I had to sign in blood. “Are you capable of getting us that much, Flintlock?” she asked.

  I was, well, capable, but it involved ethics as well. “I’m not a Samurai. You can hire any crooked kid you want to do this.”

  “Ah, but they’d cost us too much to do what we want you to do and there’s no guarantee they would succeed. And besides, who better to cut open a vault than you, Jack? You’re in a fix and time is running out. I can almost hear those Mil jets.”

  She knew she had me. And it was true that she could hire a kid from the streets to do it for her – they were good at the game –, but sixty per cent of their take would go to whomever they chose and I’d hate to see the body count after they had finished. If they survived, that was. And they wouldn’t get to spend their ill-gotten gains. I glanced around the faces gathered there; if I read them right, most of them were disgusted at the thought of hiring a bank robber to make them rich. Not that they’d get any of the money. Oh no. The money would be “for the good of the community”. Independence. Yeah, right!

  I glanced at Gil’s PAN. Lights were flashing over it faster than a Bondi lifesaver. I had time, she was working the military band.

  But what was a human’s freedom worth anyway? Well, it was priceless to me. “And if I agree, where is this ‘exchange of funds’ to take place? Where am I supposed to go in? Here? The Library? For full security, we’ll need a landline or a booth.”

  Sam spoke up next. “We can’t use the Library, Jack – they’d pick you up quickly there now; High Command has heavy ice right now. Our local gangway is in a weather station thirty-five klicks upriver. It has a Drussland Covert link. Military model. Full sensory feedback.” She didn’t seem so cold this time. Almost friendly. Money does that to people.

  “Why is there a military model in a weather station?”

  She lifted one eyebrow. “Official word is satellite backup stations require ground-based intervention ports in case of malfunction. Military models are the most reliable.”

  “And?”

  Sansan answered for her. “Information predictions are of military hardware used in twenty-six point four percent of weather satellites.”